Peter Queckenstedt's Design Blog
Pixel art, industrial design, concept sketches.
Posts Tagged ‘ pixel art ’
New, simpler terrain shader + textures.
I’m dipping into The Salvage again this week with some encouraging results. Here you can see what is likely to be the final concept for how terrain will be lit.
In the old system I envisioned drawing the ground texture and lighting in a single procedural process. That system gave some decent results but I wasn’t crazy about how it seemed to handle undercuts on terrain poorly.
The new system uses a three layer approach. First a traditional tiling texture is laid onto the terrain. Shadow is then applied procedurally, darkening the texture in the deeper portions and darkening the undersides of undercuts. A final thin highlight is added procedurally to all ‘top’ edges of the terrain.
Right now the images just show hand-painted mock ups, but it’s a workable system within a game engine.
Back Hacking at Terrain
Terrain generation in games always seems to be a nemesis of mine. It’s infinitely tweak-able, and if it looks the least bit ‘wrong’ it sticks in my craw.
I’m thinking a combination of tiled pattern and light sourcing might be the best way to do The Salvage’s landscape, with the tiled pattern applied to the freeform procedural land outline. Anyway, it’s worth a shot.
Here’s a sedimentary rock pattern. Still needs more variation to reduce repetition, but also once the lighting is implemented that will become less noticeable.
Walk Cycle
Walking animation. 6 frames. Neato headlamp effect.
Revamping the Terrain Shader
I got some feedback from the TIGSource forums regarding the ultra uniform terrain shading in The Salvage mockups. Honestly I’d had concerns about it myself, but this helped kick my butt into addressing it. After talking to James is seems I can get much more dynamic with the shading yet still have it be duplicated through procedural means.
Here’s a really quick mockup. More to come.
Oh, also asteroids! More to come on those horrors too!
The Spike
The Spike is a tool which can be leased from the Bankers. It allows for major excavations by tearing a portion of the planet away.
A Quake
Earthquakes tear open fissures in the ground and heave large chunks out of position. They can be highly disruptive to subterranean recovery operations by displacing machinery, collapsing tunnels and rerouting flow patterns.
A Storm Arrives
Storms are a common occurrence which often result in flooding dig sites and eroding tunnels without proper reinforcement. Not all rains are inert liquid. Some are composed of corrosive chemicals. Rainfall can also mix with dangerous substances inside a dig to create hazardous pools.
The Bankers visit The Salvager
An assessor looks on as the obeisant treasure seeker trades words with a majordomo of the Inner-Spin Countinghouse. A profitable accumulation of artifacts has been detected at the nearby dig site, and the bank has dispatched a ship to negotiate the loan of special equipment vital for recovering this wealth. This meeting is gravely important to the success of the dig, and the treasure seeker kneels out of respect for the terrible fiscal power the bankers hold.
Dropship
Click to enlarge.
The bank clerk arrives to inspect salvage ventures. Ruinously expensive tools will be leased based on the veracity of a Digger’s claim.
The Salvage. Mockup
Click for increased scale!
Pixel art mockup for a game idea I’m working on. Excavate ancient cosmic relics from a far-flung world filled with hostile environmental hazards. Think of a Worms-like engine with destructible terrain and fluid physics, with crisis management similar in pace to Sim City. The challenge will not only be to locate buried hulks and return their godlike powers to the Stellar Bazaar, but to simply survive the ordeal. Floods, earthquakes, cave-ins, asteroid strikes, electrical storms, solar winds, corrosive gas pockets, abrasion hurricanes and other indiscriminate deaths will try to leave you dead and forgotten.
Strategy Game Terrain Mockup, Quick Colour Test
Two tests of my previous terrain mockup in colour. I want the hues muted in order to keep the screen comfortable to view for extended periods
Strategy Game, Terrain Mockup, Greyscale
Drew a mockup of how the pixel art terrain would look and how it all reads. As you can see the important information is clearly displayed, and a player could easily distinguish between different terrain types. Still greyscale at this stage, maybe I’ll throw down some colour variations this week. I also need to mockup the unit sprites in vector art so that I can show how they will read against the background.
The issue of visual clarity within game design really got put into my head the past couple days as I’m playing a new indie game called Frozen Synapse. It’s an excellent game made by a team with heaps of promise, however it suffers from really bad colour / tone selection in its graphics. It has been lauded for using a sort of abstracted ‘tron’ aesthetic, which is cool, but if you look at the screenshot below you can see how difficult it is to read the battlefield and the information it contains. Not only did they make the mistake of using default hues of blue, red, and green; but the colours are all over-saturated and literally strain the eyes.
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Peter Queckenstedt's Design Blog 